Standalone applications and Web sites create islands of functionality and data. Users are forced to navigate manually between Web sites, devices, and applications, logging in each time, and rarely being able to carry data from one site to another. This makes business tasks that ought to be simple, such as arranging a meeting with colleagues from partner companies and automatically updating every attendee's calendar, very difficult. This inefficiency is a major source for productivity loss.
As a result of the changes in how businesses and consumers use the Web, the industry is converging on a new computing model that enables a standard way of building applications and processes to connect and exchange information over the Web. This new Internet-based integration methodology, called “XML Web services,” enables applications, machines, and business processes to work together. Web services describe themselves to the outside world; telling what functions they perform, how they can be accessed, and what kinds of data they require. The widespread support around XML assures that businesses will cooperate in the Internet-based economy with this XML Web services model.
The XML Web services utilize XML (extensible Markup Language), which is an open industry standard managed by the World Wide Web Consortium. It enables developers to describe data being exchanged between PCs, smart devices, applications, and Web sites, etc. Because the data is separate from the format and style definitions, it can be easily organized, programmed, edited, and exchanged between Web sites, applications, and devices. XML has transformed how applications talk to each other, thus more and more businesses are exchanging data and processing documents electronically.
However, many businesses have systems that are incompatible with XML. Thus, these systems cannot be called as Web services. A solution to this problem is found in the BizTalk Framework, available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., which addresses these interoperability challenges in a platform and technology-neutral manner. It provides specifications for the design and development of XML-based messaging solutions for communication between applications and organizations. BizTalk is capable of receiving documents submitted through a wide variety of transports, such as HTTP, SMTP, and SOAP; as e-mail attachments; through the message bus; programmatically through exposed APIs; and through adapter components. The BizTalk Server receive locations monitor HTTP, MSMQ message queues, and file locations for incoming business documents. The receive locations are responsible for submitting the received documents on to a receive pipeline, the second step in the process.
A BizTalk Server receive pipeline is set up to receive incoming documents that conform to a specific XSD schema, which defines the structure of the business data within the document. When the document arrives through a receive function, a receive pipeline can log the whole document or any portion of it to the BizTalk Document Tracking database for later analysis, or transform the document to conform to the schema of the target application. After documents are received and mapped to the format of the target application, they are delivered either directly to that application or to a business process orchestration that manages delivery to multiple target applications.
However, with all the functionality that BizTalk offers, it does not provide a method of exposing backend systems and workflows (i.e., business process orchestrations) as XML Web services. The present invention provides such a solution.